It has been shown recently that the efficiency of direct search methods that use opportunistic polling in positive spanning directions can be improved significantly by reordering the poll directions according to descent indicators built from simplex gradients. The purpose of this paper is twofold. First, we analyze the properties of simplex gradients of nonsmooth functions … Read more
The quadratic assignment problem (\QAP) is arguably one of the hardest of the NP-hard discrete optimization problems. Problems of dimension greater than 20 are considered to be large scale. Current successful solution techniques depend on branch and bound methods. However, it is difficult to get \emph{strong and inexpensive} bounds. In this paper we introduce a … Read more
In this paper we prove global convergence for first and second-order stationarity points of a class of derivative-free trust-region methods for unconstrained optimization. These methods are based on the sequential minimization of linear or quadratic models built from evaluating the objective function at sample sets. The derivative-free models are required to satisfy Taylor-type bounds but, … Read more
Semidefinite relaxations of the quadratic assignment problem (QAP) have recently turned out to provide good approximations to the optimal value of QAP. We take a systematic look at various conic relaxations of QAP. We first show that QAP can equivalently be formulated as a linear program over the cone of completely positive matrices. Since it … Read more
Under the Open Shortest Path First (OSPF) protocol, traffic flow in an Internet Protocol (IP) network is routed on the shortest paths between each source and destination. The shortest path is calculated based on pre-assigned weights on the network links. The OSPF weight setting problem is to determine a set of weights such that, if … Read more
A classical theorem in Combinatorial Optimization proves the existence of fully polynomial- time approximation schemes for the knapsack problem. In a recent paper, Van Vyve and Wolsey ask whether for each 0 < epsilon ≤ 1 there exists an extended formulation for the knapsack problem, of size polynomial in the number of variables and/or 1/epsilon ... Read more
We establish that any nonconvex quadratic program having a mix of binary and continuous variables over a bounded feasible set can be represented as a linear program over the dual of the cone of copositive matrices. This result can be viewed as an extension of earlier separate results, which have established the copositive representation of … Read more
It is a matter of common knowledge that traditional Markowitz optimization based on sample means and covariances performs poorly in practice. For this reason, diverse attempts were made to improve performance of portfolio optimization. In this paper, we investigate three popular portfolio selection models built upon classical mean-variance theory. The first model is an extension … Read more
In the seminal work [1] L. Lovász introduced the concept of an orthonormal representation of a graph, and also a related value, now popularly known as the Lováasz number of the graph. One of the remarkable properties of the Lovász number is that it lies sandwiched between the stability number and the complementer chromatic number. … Read more
Recently Cambini and Carosi described a characterization of pseudolinearity of quadratic fractional functions. A reformulation of their result was given by Rapcsák. Using this reformulation, in this paper we describe an alternative proof of the Cambini–Carosi Theorem. Our proof is shorter than the proof given by Cambini–Carosi and less involved than the proof given by … Read more